#transparent tutorial

How To Make Renders/Transparents

Step 1: get your materials together

1. get an art program of some kind. we use clip studio paint, but it is not required at all, its just the one we use for our other art.

2. we use a drawing tablet, but you can do all this on your phone or you can use a mouse.

3. pick the official art you want to make in to a transparent. don’t use fanart. i get most of the art off of the fandom’s wiki, however, you know, just use common sense.

Step 2: get started

1. open your image in your program.

2. add a layer behind this layer, with a grey colour fill. 

3. make a new layer and pick a very bright colour, i use a bright green.

4. start outlining the area you want to be cut out with the ‘pen’ tool. include all the extra areas of background inside the original outline.

Step 3: actually cutting it out

1. make the image layer invisible, and use the auto select tool, inside the green outline.

2. now, find the select area and click the program’s equivilant of ‘invert selection’. this will select all the area you want to cut out.

3. click on your image layer and make it visible again. then, use ‘edit’ and ‘cut’. this should get rid of all the area around the character.

Step 4: cleaning the transparent

1. hide the outline layer and look for imperfections in your transparent. these can be wobbly lines, random white spots, or anything like that.

2. go in with the eraser tool and manually remove all these imperfections. this can be a little time consuming, but you’ll get the cleanest result this way.

3. test the transparent on something else, as if you were using it in an edit. does everything look good? if it does, you’re done! if not, keep going until its as good as you can get.

Step 5: save your image

1. make sure to hide the grey background layer before you save! this will make your transparent, well, transparent.

and here’s the finished product!

1. open photoshop! best program to use in my experience

2. select the quick selection tool (circled in red)

3. go to the top and click select subject!

this is the method that will work best if your backgrounds are relatively plain. if they're not, you're going to have to paint the selection on by hand, rather than the software doing it for you.

4. clean up the selection if necessary! do u see the little dotted lines ("marching ants" is what they're called apparently) surrounding the cat bread? that's what the computer has deemed "the subject" of the image! it's pretty correct this time, except there are lines around the ears that will lead them to being cut out, which i don't want. so i cleaned that up a bit.

use the circled tools above ^ to clean it up. no more ants around the pink of the cat ears! i used the tool with the + sign because i wanted to add content from the image to the selection. use the - tool when u want to get rid of content.

5. add a vector mask! this will get rid of all of the content outside of the selection. it's in the lower right-hand corner:

6. select select and mask... at the top, right next to where select subject was!

this will open up settings for the image, like so:

tweak the smooth, feather, contrast, and shift edge settings until you feel like it looks right. smooth will simply smooth out edges that might be rough. feather will do the opposite, creating almost a gradient of transparency. contrast makes the edges sharper. shift edge shifts the edges of the image (obviously), taking away or giving back image material based on how u moved it.

all i did was smooth and contrast!

6.1. protip! press the |\ key to give a temporary reddish bg to the image so u can test how the edges look against smth that isn't the default transparent bg!

and that's it !! here is the finished product!: